Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Understand them, yes. The question would be less their 'ethics' than their 'morals'. There's a difference.
The truly unnerving aspect of genuine supermen would be that they might apply the same morals we believe in accordance with the superior perceptions to produce results that might be objectively right, but that we would find horrifying.
Frank Herbert, in a letter to John Campbell, once used the example of a human and a horse. A horse might be too badly hurt to recover, all that lies ahead of him is a slow, painful death, so the human mercifully puts a bullet in him now to make it quick. (Or something on those lines, it's been a long time since I read it.)
Herbert's point was that the horse, if it could grasp what was being decided, would almost surely disagree with the decision, esp. if it could not comprehend why there was no hope of survival or improvement. The human might well be right about the suffering involved, but the horse can't comprehend that, all it knows (to the degree it knows anything) is that it's being killed by its master.
The same dynamic might well apply to the interactions of true supermen and men. It's hard to portray believably (because supermen are hard to portray believably), but this does show up in fiction here and there. I mentioned Frank Herbert, this dynamic animates the Dune stories at a deep level, especially with the character of Leto Atreides the Second. He's a true superman, and his actions are intended for the best interest of the human race in general, and he may well be entirely right about that. He's still a horror from the basic human POV in many ways.
Herbert even has Leto II comment at one point that beings like himself (there have been others, he's just the greatest of them) have never much cared whether mortals agree with the decisions they make about them or for them, because they know better than we do what is best.
Insufferably arrogant? Yes....except that Leto is very probably right. He really is a superman.
Another example is the Arisians from the old Lensman space operas, who are far greater supermen. They are sort of benevolent. They have enough power to do just about anything, by human standards. But they can, and will, sit back and let billions be tortured or die, nations fall, worlds burn, in service of a larger long term good. They sat back let world-wrecking nuclear wars devastate Earth at least twice. They let a race of psychic vampires torture uncounted Velantians to death, generation after generation after generation. They sat back and let the bad guys cause everything from the Holocaust to Pol Pot to Nero to interplanetary wars. Multiply that by millions of worlds all over two galaxies.
They have good reasons...from the POV of a race of god-like supermen. From a mortal POV, the Arisians could easily look demonic.
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